We have also been creating a video addon, the Walkthrough Video, which is a screen recording of the Matterport-based walkthrough enhanced with intro and outro slides with your info, music, speed ramps and effects along with both branded and unbranded horizontal videos (for the tour or embedding elsewhere) and a vertical video that is optimized for each room view for social media.  The standard price for this addon with the 3 videos is $50.  Your account may reflect a different price based on the corporate deals in place with your brokerage.  Its a great value and creates cool content you can use in multiple ways. 

Now is the best time to leverage this Walkthrough Video addon.

As you may know, there is a current dispute between Zillow and Matterport’s parent company, Costar, around various content use issues.  The bottom line is Costar does not want Zillow to use content it creates exclusively for its service offerings, such as marketing services it provides for Apartments.com and Homes.com direct customers.  Costar claims exclusive display rights to the content it creates…but that only applies to content Costar creates, not the hundreds of thousands of properties that were scanned by 3rd parties like HomeDiary using the Matterport platform.  However, Zillow has decided to just remove ALL Matterport links regardless of who did the Matterport scan, including from their photographer platform some of our competitors use, Areyo, which means if someone uses Areyo (Zillow) as their photography platform, their virtual tours will not be able to display Matterport.  Its a bad move for the consumer, and you, by Zillow.  If you have a paid relationship with Zillow you should let them know your opinion on this move.

So to combat this move by Zillow, our Walkthrough Video addon can be added to your MLS as an additional virtual tour link IF they support more than one virtual tour.  If your MLS only supports one virtual tour link, we highly recommend you continue to post the HomeDiary virtual tour as the virtual tour.  Why?  3 reasons:

1. Our tour includes our patented Brandkeepr process, so the branded tour should be seen when clicked on from Zillow.com, Realtor.com, Redfin.com and even your own company and personal website if set up in your profile.  This gets you more FREE buyer and seller leads because as research shows, people want to work with agents that provide the kind of content we create with our Interactive FloorPlan & 3D Walkthrough Tours.  That is how Valerie made an additional $75,000 in commission.

2. You can further enhance the branded tour with branded photos, videos, documents and text to differentiate the listing and you further.  When you add additional content, just select the toggle that says Contains Branded Content and it will only show on the branded version of the virtual tour.

3. Our tour includes all the content for the listing we create and you can even embed other content into it, so one link has ALL the content needed, and on select sites it can show your info too.  As the primary virtual tour, it should get distributed everywhere, and on your competitor websites they will see the unbranded tour, as required per the IDX rules.

Matterport is the best 3D visualization tool for properties, which is why we have used it for 10 years now, and it allows us to import the Matterport into our own floor plan engine to create highly accurate floor plans that can get passed on to the buyer so they can use and edit post sale, and you also have full edit control.  It also includes our interactive 3D space planner/designer, an HGTV-like floor planner tool.  We even have a Certified Square Footage addon in select markets if you want to really know the true size of your listing. 

In the hands of the buyer, our floor plan tool can be used to visualize furniture placement, add or remove walls to visualize remodeling ideas, change flooring or wall colors to experiment with updates, and it can even be used for landscape or exterior property improvements.  92% of buyers surveyed by the WAV Group indicated they valued the ability to drag and drop furniture to check for size and placement.  We go way beyond this with our tool, as it can be used to visualize interior and exterior projects, like you see below for my house where I used it to map out our artificial turf area for our dogs, as well as visualize size and placement for a new pool which can include the square footage of hardscape areas like stamped concrete.  You can see I was able to add a drone photo and overlay the floor plan and pool layout on top of this as a layer.  Pretty cool, and very useful as a homeowner!

Many of our competitors are now resorting to much cheaper platforms and the user experience is horrible, not to mention the quality of the 3D tour and floor plans created is vastly inferior (i.e., not accurate, less features, bad visuals) to what Matterport converted into the HomeDiary floor plans can provide.  Zillow’s 3D Home tour for example has no visual enhancement of the 360 images captured so things are typically dark and yellow (so your listing’s visual is not presented well), the user interface is clunky and awkward, and the floor plans their system creates are not accurate.  On our demo house, the Zillow floor plan created from their 3D tour was 13.7% OFF from the certified square footage number. Individual room measurements, as a result, were also off.  Plus, everyone else just provides a PDF or jpeg of the floor plan – HomeDiary is the only platform providing interactive 2D & 3D versions of the floor plan usable over time.  Don’t your listings, and sellers, deserve the best?

The Walkthrough Video is just a derivative of what we are already doing, but it allows you to post it to YouTube or social media sites, or embed it on your own website or email distribution system for additional content and discussion opportunities.  When we create the video, we upload it to our Vimeo account so you have a hosted video you can use as an additional “virtual tour” link if your MLS supports more than one virtual tour link.  Seattle and Austin support up to 3 virtual links, for example, which can be our tour, the Matterport and/or video links.  Zillow will pick it up as a video since the URL will be vimeo.com not Matterport.com (and if your listing is Showcase we can now embed the video on Zillow if we did the Showcase work for you) and other sites may even embed both the Matterport and video version of it on your listing’s page (such as Redfin). Plus you can embed it anywhere else, download it and do further edits, like add your own voiceover, and it will be displayed on your HomeDiary virtual tour as a Walkthrough video by default (you can always turn it off from showing under the Presentation settings).

Click the videos below to see examples of these upgraded videos.

Examples of Walkthrough Videos

example of branded vertical video for social media